Friday, June 18, 2004 :::
Racial silliness:The lawyers say Johnson & Johnson's use of credit checks to screen applicants discriminates against African-Americans who've historically had less access to credit than whites.
Silly enough, I think, before we seethat Matthews applied for the position of tax specialist in the company's global patent office, a job "involving the timely payment of fees."
They weren't just looking for someone who wasn't irresponsible; they were looking for someone who wasn't irresponsible in the exact kind of way that would likely expose the company to massive liability. And it's a good thing they were specific, because apparently this racial silliness has a recognized legal basis:In some previous cases, the EEOC has found that checking the credit of job applicants is discriminatory."It's our position that excluding people with poor credit may have a disparate impact on some minority groups and therefore may be discriminatory under civil rights law, but that is assessed on a case-by-case basis," said David Grinberg, an EEOC spokesman.
The failure to use this appropriate screen has a "disparate impact" on all other groups, then; if it makes natural sense to use it, it would just as plausibly be discriminatory to unnaturally abstain from using it. If set A of employment screens results in a different racial balance than set B of employment screens, is it simply up to the EEOC to tell us which set is appropriate?Humor me for as long as you like as I continue on my rant on "disparate impact". There were people who said restraining the growth in welfare was racist because it had "a disparate impact". Taking their facts for granted, this would imply that welfare was a racist program to begin with, as it had a "disparate impact". But maybe "do nothing" isn't the racially neutral basis from which these people want to determine that any racially disparate deviation is racist; maybe the status quo is sancrosanct unless changes to it are racially neutral. In that case, desegregation was racist; it had a different impact on different races. Would it have been morally preferable that they leave alone the situation that had been in place for lifetimes?
This simply gets left out, this question of the control comparison; it goes unanswered how the preordained relative racial impact is to be determined. If pre-natal testing for genetic diseases were added to the health plan, but testing for sickle-cell anemia were explicitly left out, this could well be viewed as racist; there was never testing for sickle cell anemia before, but leaving it out of genetic testing might be an unnatural exception to the new program. Why is leaving a credit check out of employment screening any more natural? Is employment itself simply racist, such that it needs to be fixed up by bolting on such contrivances as a lack of a credit check?
What a world.
::: posted by dWj at 6:44 PM
